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Generosity and Philanthropy a Literature Review

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Generosity and Philanthropy a Literature Review GENEROSITY AND PHILANTHROPY A LITERATURE REVIEW René Bekkers ICS/Department of Sociology, Utrecht University Department of Philanthropic Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Pamala Wiepking Department of Philanthropic Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam November 8, 2007 1 Abstract We present an overview of the academic literature on philanthropy, divided in two parts: 1. Who gives how much; 2. Why people give. In part 1 we survey the literature on characteristics of individuals and households that are related to giving. In part 2, we identify eight mechanisms as the most important forces that drive giving: (1) awareness of need; (2) solicitation; (3) costs and benefits; (4) altruism; (5) reputation; (6) psychological benefits; (7) values; (8) efficacy. We evaluate the progress in the almost 500 studies we reviewed and suggest directions for future research on philanthropy. Acknowledgements This paper was written with financial support of the John Templeton Foundation and grant #451-04-110 of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) to Bekkers. A previous version of this paper was presented at the 35th Annual Conference of the Association for Research on Nonprofit and Voluntary Action, November 16-18, 2006, Chicago, the Civil Society Congress, May 31, 2007, Utrecht, and the WWAV Academy, June 4, 2007, Woerden. We thank the audiences for helpful comments and suggestions. Thanks to various colleagues who provided articles we could not find and who clarified their findings. This is work in progress. The current version refers to almost 500 publications. We welcome any comments at [email protected], including suggestions on papers not mentioned yet. An updated version of this paper can be found at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1015507 Copyright © 2007 René Bekkers and Pamala Wiepking. 2 Introduction An overwhelming body of knowledge is available on philanthropy in the social sciences. Research on philanthropy appears in journals of very different disciplines, including marketing, economics, social psychology, biological psychology, neurology and brain sciences, sociology, political science, anthropology, biology, and evolutionary psychology. Scholars as well as practitioners educated in these disciplines could benefit from a systematic survey of the mechanisms studied in the academic literature. We present an overview of research on determinants of charitable giving from all disciplines. More than thirty years ago, David Horton Smith wrote that ‘scholars concerned about voluntary action research should consciously seek out cross-disciplinary inputs’(Smith 1975), a call that Payton, Tempel and Rosso (Payton et al 1991) and Clotfelter (1997) more recently made as well. Since the 1980s, philanthropic studies have emerged as a new, multi- disciplinary field in the social sciences (Katz 1999). However, a strong tendency in the past 30 years towards specialization among scientists in different disciplines has created the undesirable situation that scholars usually know little about the insights gathered in other disciplines. In addition, few of the insights from the academic literature have found their way in handbooks on fundraising. The assessment by Lindahl and Conley (2002) that fundraising is “a field in need of a greater base of substantive, objective research rather than a casual acceptance of anecdotical evidence” still holds. For instance, Warwick’s (2001) guide to successful fundraising letters contains literally zero references to scientific research. This paper aims to guide scholars as well as practitioners in the third sector through the available knowledge on determinants of charitable giving by individuals and households. We define charitable giving as the donation of money to an organization that benefits others beyond one’s own family. Previous reviews available to researchers in philanthropy are mostly confined to a specific discipline or a limited period of time. Recently, Sargeant and Woodliffe (2007) reviewed the literature on charitable giving from a marketing perspective. Reviews in the field in social psychology have dealt with helping behaviour in general (Batson 1998; Piliavin & Charng 1990; Schroeder et al 1995; Schwartz 1975). Helping behaviour is a very broad category of actions, ranging from assisting a stranger in an emergency (e.g., saving somebody from a fire, (Latané & Darley 1970) to donating a piece of one’s body to a relative (e.g., bone marrow donation; Schwarz and Howard, 1980). Charitable giving is also studied as an example of helping behaviour in the social psychological literature: The subject gained popularity in mainstream social psychology towards the end of the 1970s, and continued to be studied in applied social psychology in the 1980s. However, charitable giving is likely to be different from many other forms of helping behaviour. One crucial difference is that the recipient of charitable donations is usually absent from the context in which a donation is made, while the beneficiary is present in the helping situation investigated in most studies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s. The present review differs from that by Piliavin and Charng (1990) in that we are not concerned primarily with the question to what extent prosocial behavior can be called altruistic. We will return to this issue in the discussion section. Our review also differs from that of the overviews of economic theories of giving by Andreoni (2006b), Vesterlund (2006) and Meier (2007). Economists are increasingly trying to incorporate basic insights from sociology and social psychology into their models. However, many classical studies that provided these insights are unknown or not cited in present day economics. Our review may serve as a reference resource for classical intuitions. In addition, we present studies in disciplines like marketing, geography and biology that are not well known. 3 To our knowledge, no systematic reviews on philanthropy exist in the fields of sociology or psychology. Sociologist John Wilson (2000) reviewed the literature on volunteering. Because volunteering like philanthropy is a form of formal prosocial behaviour, there are many striking parallels between their respective determinants. When such parallels are instructive for understanding philanthropy we mention them. Finally, our review also differs from the reviews by Sargeant (1999), Lindahl and Conley (2002), Havens, O’Herlihy and Schervish (2007) and Sargeant and Woodliffe (2007), by covering a longer period of time, studies from a larger number of sources, and ordering the material in different categories. The categories used in previous reviews are broad groups of predictors. We present predictors of philanthropy in terms of the mechanisms that explain why these predictors are related to philanthropy. We hope that our review will not only be useful for an academic audience, but also for practitioners. We translate the knowledge gained in experimental studies and survey studies into practical advice for fundraisers. Experimental studies often shed light upon why some people are more likely to give and some give more generously than others. Fundraisers can take advantage of the insights gained in these studies because the position of the experimenter is similar to the position of the fundraiser. Within certain limits, fundraisers can change the situations in which people decide about giving to nonprofit organizations, like academics conducting experiments. Based on the experiments that we review below, we suggest practical implications for the design of fundraising campaigns. Methods This paper is based on an extensive literature search that we conducted using seven types of sources. We searched (1) online full text collections of publishers (Wiley Interscience, Emerald Insight, SpringerLink, Sage Journals Online; Elsevier’s Scirius); (2) academic databases (PsychInfo, Sociological Abstracts, PubMed, EconLit); (3) Google Scholar; (4) the authors’ own literature databases; (5) the references cited in the articles we found; (6) the IUPUI Payton Library Philanthropic Studies Index; (7) Arnova Abstracts. We used the following keywords: donations, philanthropy, charitable giving, charitable behavior, altruism, helping, prosocial behavior. This search yielded thousands of ‘hits’. Then we refined our search to include only papers that contained empirical analyses of charitable giving by adult individuals or households. Theoretical papers (not reporting empirical data), studies using children as participants, and studies on charitable behaviour of organizations are not reviewed. Studies on contributions to public goods in experiments are included only when such contributions involve real money to real charitable organizations. Studies identifying individuals as recipients (e.g., ‘dictator games’ in experimental economics) are included only when recipients are strangers and when it is clear to the participants of the study that decisions are charitable donations. Studies in languages other than English are disregarded, although they were used to retrieve references to other studies with characteristics that fit our restrictions. Our search yielded only a few publications in languages other than English, notably Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, and Polish. Most of the studies were conducted in the United States, followed by the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Canada. This may be a source of bias; although it is unclear to what extent the bias is systematic. Unless otherwise noted, ‘giving’ refers
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